self-consciousness

High heels are a short (theist) woman's (subconscious) way of telling God to go to hell _ in public.

Self-consciousness isn't just A curse. It is part of THE curse.

Quite possibly, the purpose of the universe is to provide a congenial home for self-conscious creatures who can ask profound questions and who can probe the nature of the universe itself.

One of the reasons we judge each other so harshly in this world of parenting is because... we perceive anyone else who's doing anything differently than what we're doing as criticizing our choices.

A gold tooth is to some blacks, what braces are to all whites.

In a deserted stretch of the Karadj highway Munis had come face-to-face with unbridled lust, although she knew what lust was before being touched by it. The problem was that she had an unbounded awareness of things, an awareness that instilled undue caution in her, making her fearful that action would lead to ignominy, humiliation. This created in her a desire to be ordinary, average. Yet she did not truly know what it meant to be ordinary. She did not know that it meant not loving an earthworm, not genuflecting at the altar of withered leaves, not standing in prayer at the call of a lark, not climbing a mountain to see the sunrise, not staying awake all night to gaze at the Ursa Major. She did not differentiate between earth and gravel, but she distinguished the earth from the sky. She had not seen the skies of the earth, but she knew there were earths of the sky. She saw herself in an inevitable process of stagnation. She was already partially rotten within."What can I do with this mass of trivial knowledge?" she wondered aloud. "How can I cut through it?